At Last–The Hungover Cookbook is Here

There are a lot of home remedies for hangovers out there and NewsFeed has heard them all–eat a lot, eat nothing, eat bananas (something about the potassium), drink water, start drinking alcohol again. Each works for a while, but you never actually feel much better.

But at last someone has something that seems to make sense–Milton Crawford has crafted The Hungover Cookbook, filled with recipes that are meant to cure whatever sort of hangover you are afflicted with (because not every hangover is created equally).

Based on the novel The Mating Season‘s description of six different types of hangovers, the cookbook offers tailor-made recipes, depending on the particular hangover you’re suffering from. There’s the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie.

For a Broken Compass morning–where you feel disoriented, confused and restless–Crawford recommends “spicy comfort food to reignite your passion for life.” The Sewing Machine–where a pulsing headache feels like you have sewing machine inside your head–Crawford suggests comfort food, like a peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich (again with the bananas).

The concept is great–following instructions the morning after a bender is much easier than, say, thinking of things to cook on your own–but NewsFeed isn’t sure how realistic it is to expect anyone with a hangover to be willing and able to create some of these concoctions. As Phil Daoust from the Guardianpoints out, “Personally, I’ve never had a hangover worthy of the name that would let me zest a lemon, as required for Crawford’s lemon and demerara sugar pancakes.”

But Crawford seems to be the optimistic sort. He writes in The Hungover Cookbook, “A hangover is an opportunity to see and taste the world in a new way.”

Which is just the kind of cheerful attitude that anyone would want to be confronted with when dizzily dealing with a pounding skull and quivering stomach, right?